Carnival relevance?

Recently I have been thinking about the use of blog carnivals. Do they get read by enough people to be considered useful? Do the people who read them actually click through to blog posts they wouldn't have otherwise? Presumably people who read carnivals regularly read a number of blogs regularly, too. So does the carnival add anything for these readers? And what about people who aren't regular readers of featured blogs? Are there any? Do people who don't usually read about the subject matter learn about it through carnivals?

Is there a point in continuing Carnival of Evolution? Sometimes I get the suspicion that readers are a very select group of people who would read these posts about evolution anyway, in which case I don't think the carnival has much to offer. What do you think?

I have been trying to get CoE hosts to think of new ways to spice up the monthly edition, with limited success. And yet I wonder if that makes any difference at all to anybody. Are more people reading more blog posts on evolution due to CoE? That's really the core question, because that would and should be the purpose of the carnival.

I'd like to know what the answers are, and to that end I tam thinking about making a questionnaire and get it featured on the June edition of CoE. However, I often find that such polls end up not really answering the overall question, so I am asking you what those questions should be. If you can think of specific question to ask CoE readers that will get to the relevance of CoE, please post them here or send me an email.

If you have ideas for how to increase the relevance of carnivals, please feel free to share them here as well.

34th edition...

Just up at Quintessence of Dust.



Thanks to Steve Matheson for hosting.

Anyone interested on hosting an edition this summer?